Brittle Innings

by Michael Bishop

  And stayed there, where my kidneys began to feel like hip-hugging cocktail shakers. In the fields whipping by, I could make out pole beans, snap beans, alfalfa, cotton. The soil had the richness of devil’s food cake. We drove deeper into the unreconstructed South. The air thickened, smells got odder, the unfamiliar crops sort of scared me.

  A soldier came out onto my platform. I bent over my rail, but he didn’t go away. I could feel his stare seeping through the back of my shirt and up my arms-like kerosene through a pile of rags. Finally, I faced him.

  An older guy. Stripes on his sleeves, ribbons on his breast pocket, heavy lips. His coloring reminded me of a slice of Spam. A sergeant. A vet of some combat theater, probably. I relaxed. Battle-tempered noncoms showed themselves hard-noses in training camps, but teddy bears with kids and women and well-meaning civilians.

  “Your name Boles?” the sergeant shouted. This scared me, but I nodded. “I’m First Sergeant Pumphrey. Private Overbeck told me about you! Described you to a T! You from Tenkiller, in Oklahoma?”

  “Y-y-yessir!” I yelled back. Shaking again, not just from the rattling of the train.

  “Sergeant!” he corrected me. “I’m not an officer! I’m not a gentleman! I’m damned sure no egg-sucking sir!”

  “N-n-nosir!”

  Pumphrey gestured at the train, the flashing rails, the marching ranks of cotton. “This is horseshit! Come on!” He yanked me into the sudden hush of the passenger car.

  My ears gulped at the quiet. Pumphrey prodded me down the length of the coach, and then the length of another one, and so on until we reached a car with a lavatory. Pumphrey pushed me inside. Did he have queerish tendencies? Coach Brandon had warned us boys in fifth-period hygiene about that sort of crap, but I still didn’t get it. Half our male seniors had thought hygiene was a dirty word.

  We had that lavatory almost to ourselves. The only other guy in there had his tailbone on the back edge of a toilet seat, his toes over the seat’s front edge and his arms around his knees to keep his shoes from slipping off and jolting him awake. His open mouth hissed softly. Pumphrey ignored him like he would a water stain and backed me up against a sink.

  “I know your dad, Boles,” he said. “Until two weeks ago we served in the same goddamned support group at an Army airfield in the Aleuts. Ever hear of Otter Point?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s on Umnak. Cold as a polar bear’s prick. Windier than Chicago. Foggier than a dry-ice factory.”

  I couldn’t figure what Pumphrey wanted me to do. He seemed to blame me-or my daddy, if the part about knowing him wasn’t a lie or a smokescreen-for the Aleutian weather. His red lips flapped. Threads of spit webbed them.

  “Cold, cold, cold,” he said. “Oil up there turns to peanut butter. You use blowtorches to thaw your bomber engines. If spray gets on an airplane’s windshield, it’s like trying to see through a sheet of pebbled glass. One drop of high-octane fuel on your skin-if you’re cluck enough to expose it-will lift a blister the size of a walnut. Follow?”

  “Y-y-yessir.” I didn’t, but what the hell?

  “I once saw your old man’s eyelids freeze shut. In our Quonset, I made him rack out on a cot with his face between the struts and the canvas webbing. Held a hot cup of coffee under his eyes. Kept saying, ‘Don’t touch yourself. Unless you want to go around with a finger glued to your eyeball forever.’ You hear me, kid?”

  I nodded. Hard.

  “At’s how well I knew your papa, Boles,” Sergeant Pumphrey said. “You favor him. Grow into those ears, you could almost pass for his natural get.”

  My daddy, as I recalled him, had been a solid, good-looking man. Leaving aside my athletic ability, no one’d ever accused me of favoring him. Not in any physical way. I usually got told I didn’t resemble my father. And who feels lower than the homely kid of good-looking parents?

  Pumphrey let go of my arm and pushed away from me. “Just how much’re you like your old man, anyway?”

  That seemed a fair moment to beat it. Pumphrey was wound up, pacing and question-posing. I made a break.

  Bam! Pumphrey slid between me and the door and nearlybout paddled me slaphappy with his lips.

  “Hold it! Dickie Boles’s the worst excuse for a soldier-hell, for a human being-I’ve ever served with. A goldbrick and a back-stabber. Pray God, you take after your mama.”

  “He ever m-m-mention m-me?” I said.

  “I dunno. I guess. Said something once like he may’ve sired a son. May’ve. Like if he had, it would’ve made him a fraternity brother of God’s. Otherwise, kid, he was too busy rejigging duty rosters and miscounting ammo shipments to expend the effort.”

  “He st-still up there?”

  “Oh yeah. Oh yeah.” Pumphrey sort of giggled. “There’s ossifers on Umnak who think he should spend the rest of his natural life at Otter Point. For the sake of everybody down here in the free forty-eight.” Pumphrey moved aside again, and I stepped all over myself trying to get out of there.

  “Hold it!” He grabbed me, breathing licorice or schnapps, something sweet and foul, into my face. “Not so fast, kiddo!” I felt strangled. What’d the crazy bruiser plan to do? “How much money you got on you, Boles?”

  “M-m-money?”

  “Yeah, m-m-money. Cash money. Your goddamned dad was all the time borrowing. Wouldn’t pay it back, neither. How much you got?”

  I’d boarded the train with fifty bucks cash money, half of my first paycheck. I still had whatever I hadn’t spent.

  Pumphrey spun me, shoved me against the wall, fumbled my billfold out of my hip pocket. Holding me in place, he counted out my money, crammed the bills into his own breast pocket, and flipped the billfold into a lavatory sink.

  “You’re short. About fifty shy of what your old man owes me, kiddo.”

  “I’m n-not my father’s k-k-keeper.”

  “Maybe not. But I’m still out half a sawbuck. What’re you gonna do about it?”

  “You’re st-st-stealing. You’re a d-d-damned th-thief.”

  “Settling a debt don’t work out as theft, prick!” Pumphrey snatched me away from the wall, then slammed me back into it. My lip split. I cried out. “Hush, boy. Accounts still don’t tote. We gotta make em tote.”

  Pumphrey pushed me into the stall next to the sleeping GI’s, wedged a hankie into my mouth, and spun me around again. When he yanked my pants down, and my shorts along with them, I finally had a two-bit notion of what he had in mind and lashed back at him with an elbow. He showed me the blade of a pocketknife, told me he’d take my liver by way of my rectum if I gave him any more grief, and bent me over the open commode. What he did then took about two minutes and hurt like fire.

  “You still owe me,” Pumphrey said, yanking my pants back up. “Nine more wouldn’t break your daddy and me even.”

  I’d started to cry.

  “Stop it, Boles. Mention this to a soul, and your ass is mine forever.”

  He left me there. I fetched my billfold, washed my face and hands, and stood at the mirror not recognizing myself. The PFC on the toilet-I could see his awkwardly sprawled body in the mirror-had slept through the whole assault, snoring like an asthmatic sea lion.

  4

  Some folks find sleeping on a train soothing, like lying under a tin roof with rain chattering down. Not me. The clickety-click of grooved iron wheels sliding on long metal tongues reminds me of an alarm clock ticking. I keep waiting for the bell to go off. I kept waiting for my train to derail.

  I was near dead from humiliation, but if an alarm started to clatter, I’d spring up like a jack-in-the-box. (I’d claimed my berth after some soldiers got off at Camp Robinson and some others switched trains in Little Rock.) I drowsed some, but only after crying myself to sleep. Drowsing, I dreamt of my daddy, Richard Oconostota Boles.

  My daddy’s folks came to Oklahoma -U. S. Injun Territory-with a remnant of the cholera-stricken Cherokees from what’s now Pickens County, Georgia. See, I had great-great-great-grandfolks
, full-blooded native Americans on Daddy’s side, on the Trail of Tears. They wound up in a reservation settlement on the site of the town known today as Checotah.

  Mama Laurel was a Norwegian Helvig, a paleface farmer’s daughter through and through, but she and Daddy met at a Lutheran church picnic on Tenkiller Lake while he was doing carpentry work for a Wells Fargo agent out of Muskogee. Daddy was nineteen when I was born, seven years younger than Mama. They had a hard go of it. Money stayed tight, and my father had a hurtful weakness for honky-tonking and catting around. Mama excused him because he’d been so young when they married-seventeen, just my age when I left Oklahoma on that train-and because she adored him, never mind he had the brain of a sly ten-year-old and the loving heart of an armadillo.

  Daddy played pickup baseball whenever he could, paid good money for bad illegal whiskey, and sparked all the “bad” young gals in and around Muskogee. He built barns, smoke-houses, and graineries for folk, and he learned auto mechanics from a local Pierce Arrow dealer. He loved cars. Well, no, their motors-their grease and pistons and belts.

  A year before the stock market bottomed out, Daddy drove a trap from farm to farm selling Ful-O-Pep Mash, a chicken feed with cod-liver meal. It was supposed to prime a hen to lay eggs the size of baseballs. Mama said Daddy always held up a real baseball for skeptics, as if the mere sight would convince em. And the first time he drove his trap around hawking Ful-O-Pep, he did okay. Second visit, though, all a farmer had to do was hold one of his runty eggs next to Daddy’s baseball and the jig was up. The farmer’d say a sore-armed pitcher might appreciate the egg, but he felt cheated. Before long, Daddy quit drumming mash and locked into fixing farm machinery.

  Mama had no job then. I was her job-a go-go mobile with a PA-system mouth.

  Anyway, the market crashed, the Depression struck, and the Great Plains turned into dust sumps. Storms swept down even on our easternmost prairies and the hills around Tenkiller. Spooky roarers. The sun looked like a rusted garbage-can lid behind a big tea-stained curtain. Pure grit flowed through every chink in the shotgun hovel Daddy rented from Mr Neal on Tenkiller’s outskirts, coating every window ledge, shelf, and door lintel. It drifted into ridges under thresholds. Our gums bled. We mined our noses for booger pearls. Jobs dried up even faster than the land. Folks started to move.

  On dust-free days, Dickie Boles played ball with me. He taught me how to catch and throw. I’d stand in front of the rear wall of Tenkiller’s abandoned icehouse hurling a rubber Spaldeen at it. (One of those hard pink hollow balls city kids used for stickball.) That sucker would bounce back faster than light. I’d field it bare-handed, quick-shift my feet, and snap it back at the bricks as hard as ever I could.

  Daddy had me do that until I’d damned near drained off my last kilowatt of kid power. Time I was seven, I could play the bounce-backs for half an hour, bad hops and all, without booting a one or alley-ooping a single throw.

  “If you can handle that,” Daddy’d say, “you can field em all.”

  Daddy also taught me to hit. For that, he’d march me into the alley between the Cherokee Feed Store and Schlatt’s Small Appliances: Sparrow Alley. The chinks in the upper half of the feed-store wall sheltered hundreds of English sparrows, house sparrows, wrens. A sparrow apartment house. Those birds’d chirp and scold. If you didn’t take care, they’d get you with a whitewash bomblet or two.

  In our alley games, the pitcher stood halfway along it. The hitter faced him from its streetside mouth, a broom or a mop handle for a bat. Daddy’d start, pitching the Spaldeen underhand. Before too long he’d go to a modified wind-up and a three-quarter delivery. I had to hit as many pitches on a clothesline to dead center as I could. No pulling or pushing the Spaldeen more than a foot or so to either side of my dad. If it hit a wall before getting past him, it was an out. A ricochet beyond him was a hit, though. So were uncaught blue darters up the middle. Rollers counted as fouls, but pop-ups were inning enders even if you’d just come in. A home run had to fly out the far end of Sparrow Alley in the air.

  The Boles & Son Jes-for-Fun Oklahoma World See-ries. So Daddy called our games. If a dust squall didn’t blow up, we’d play until dark. Usually, Daddy beat me. If I won, I’d strut and preen. I’d brag to Mama. Today I know most of the games I took from Daddy were ones he let me have. Sometimes, though, he’d go on jake-leg binges and play me smashed. I’d beat him easy then, no charity to it.

  Down a few runs, he’d lose the ball on purpose or break the broom handle over his knee and call me an upstart snot-nose. I got where I avoided him drunk, even though he was a pretty easy drunk, not a mean one, right up till I took a lead on him and he began to grasp how poorly he was doing, motor skills-wise. Strange to say, after Prohibition’d ended just about everywhere but Oklahoma, Daddy swore off drink for a while. Then, when I jumped him at alleyball, he’d laugh and call me “Tenkiller’s Ty Cobb.”

  Dick Boles wasn’t Jesus Christ, but recalling him as he’d been when I was small, I couldn’t picture him like Sergeant Pumphrey did-as the sorriest man he’d ever had the bad luck to serve with. Until I was eleven or twelve, Dick Boles’d been a sockdalager daddy, good as a boy could want.

  Lots of people, with the ruin of their farmlands, loaded up their pickups and set out for California ’s San Joaquin Valley: Okies. Will Rogers said they raised IQ levels in both states. Maybe so. The Boleses didn’t go. Daddy liked Oklahoma, and Mama still had kin about-in Muskogee and Tulsa, mostly. Jobs posed a problem, though, and in ’35 Daddy disappeared for eight months. Mama knew he wasn’t dead because he sent her twenty bucks a month through a cousin in Tahlequah. I attended school by then, and Mama clerked at Rexall.

  Turned out, Daddy’d upped with the Civilian Conservation Corps. You had to be unmarried to join. Daddy fudged and got in anyway. He spent most of his time planting wind-breaks in Kansas, living in a camp between Coffeyville and Independence. The CCC gave him all his shots, fed him, and worked his tail off. Pay came to forty bucks a month, and, if the dust storms held off, all the fresh air and sunshine he could stand. Daddy snuck away in September, beelining it home. One of his bosses had acted like General Black Jack Pershing-plus, Daddy hadn’t been able to tinker with car engines as much as he liked.

  In ’37 or ’38, Deck Glider opened its plant in Tenkiller. Probably Colonel Elshtain’s doing, using his connections. A few months later, Mama said good-bye to Rexall’s and went on the line at Deck Glider. Her take-home pay doubled. About this time, I guess, Daddy started breaking down into the no-account jerk Pumphrey remembered from Otter Point. He could’ve had him a job at Deck Glider too, but the very idea of hunching indoors over buffer-brush assemblies made him stir crazy. He figured Mama herself would finally crack and begged her to quit. She wouldn’t. He smuggled booze in from Fort Smith, or bought it off local leggers, and got stewed three or four times a week. He and Mama battled. Lots of times, they woke me up screeching like peacocks and shoving chairs around. Mornings, scratches on the floor would shine like yellow paint.

  The summer World War Two started in Europe, Daddy cut out again. So what? I asked myself. So what? He hadn’t taken me to Sparrow Alley for months. I’d fire bounce-backs at the old icehouse, though, over and over-until my arms felt like window-sash weights. An outlet, you know. Therapy, a shrink today’d call it.

  Mama and I expected Daddy back at any moment, the way he’d turned up, hungry puppy-like, after his unhappy stint with the CCC, but as the days wore on and the news from overseas got gloomier, we stopped expecting it. He didn’t wire us cash every month, the way he had before, and none of his cousins in the area would admit to having a clue about his whereabouts. Maybe they really didn’t, but Mama had her doubts.

  In my Pullman berth, though, I dreamt about him.

  My Red Stix team has to play a bunch of soldiers on a windy airfield in the Aleutians. Us Tenkillerites have on our regular flannel baseball togs, but the soldiers have dressed for the cold: boots, jackets with hoods, gloves like Army-drab oven m
itts. An away game, see? The home team sets the playing conditions. I hop around at short, flapping my arms to keep warm. I hate playing soldiers because they’re older and more experienced. And, up in the Aleuts, they get last bat.

  Bottom of an inning, pretty far along. Feels like we’ve played a week. Otter Point two, Tenkiller zero. Except for the screaming wind, my dream’s silent. Guys open their mouths, but nothing comes out. I can’t tell if the wind’s drowning our voices or floating overhead like piano notes at an old Buster Keaton flick.

  After a while, I seem to be alone. I’ve got teammates, but shrouds of fog have swallowed them. They’re like ghosts in fuzzy straitjackets, I’m the only Red Stix player with a clear outline or any freedom of movement, the only Red Stix player acting fired up, but I’m… well, I’m scared.

  When I move, my spikes strike fire-like wading through an ankle-high forest of Fourth of July sparklers. The airfield is a big checkerboard of holey steel mats. The engineers on Umnak have locked the mats together over the tundra as a runway for patched-up Flying Fortresses and Liberators. In newsreels, it’s called Marsden matting.

  From that point on, every batted ball comes my way, every chance. Grounders skip at me like lopsided rocks. Pop-ups and liners are worse. Every time I dive or try to set myself, I snag my spikes in the grid and fall. The mats’ edges slice me up. My hands bleed, my knees look like tomato pulp.

  C-c-come on, you g-guys! I yell. Ya g-g-gotta h-help me! The wind blows my words to Siberia. I only hear them because I yelled them into the godawful williwaw.

  Hours later, I get the inning’s last out and hobble in for my own at bats. The other Red Stix have vanished. I’ve got to bring us back from what looks like sure defeat-the Umnak bunch must’ve scored a dozen times in their at bat-but the cold’s begun to gnaw into me. My fingers feel carrot-stick brittle. Two or three snap off when I pick up my bat.